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WvW happenings

We're finally in a matchup that's got relatively balanced numbers on all three sides. As a result our experienced WvW players are pushing the enemy hard and we've developed a small but solid lead already and have been fending off attacks on Stonemist Castle and our many holdings with great success.

The GH community have posted a couple of WvW events to strengthen our position with some more organised parties and tactics- one is today (Sunday) at 7PM and the other is Weds 9th at 7PM UK time. If you've signed up for the GH.eu forum the details are here:

I'll be on the Sunday one and a few RPS peeps have said they can make it, so come along if you're interested in killing strangers and looting their bags, or want to see what some high-end WvW play is like. The last one of these we did was great fun and very successful, and Horace was infinitely pleased with our doings.

Bugger. It's my birthday tomorrow and so I'm ending up missing out fighting in all the great events this week due to RL shenanigans. I'll try to float around if and when I can, but otherwise fight on brothers and sisters!

Guild Wars 2:

Main character name is Seigous Bearheart. I also play on Duke Witherheart. And Lindenheart.

The Sunday event saw GH field big numbers in a coordinated way and we had some truly epic battles with the enemy, some of whom also happened to be running their own events. Today saw us fend off both enemies from Stonemist for eight hours(!)- I turned up at the end to see all three sides fighting over the lord and the poor server struggling to cope with the load. We pushed them all out in the end and hunted them down. This week has been the high point of matches since launch so far as the sides are fairly balanced and there's been some really skilled play.

As well as Wednesday there's another organised event planned for Friday night before the match resets at 11.30PM GMT. Again the plan is for 3-4 organised 10-man squads coordinating over the GH mumble, but all are welcome to form up alongside as their own (rather large) group.

As has already been said it was an epic 8 hour defense of Stonemist that became the memorable conflict of the day (maybe the week). Still on a break from uni would you believe so hoping to make most of the events this week .

Yes the community has kicked off a Gunnar's Night [GN] team- basically a secondary guild for ease of organisation and chat for people on outside EU primetime hours, so anyone who's on around then may want to check it out.

The graph showing our slide in the tiers is here http://mos.millenium.org/matchups/evolution/eu and people jumping to more successful servers caused things to snowball in both directions. After many months of fighting servers that outnumbered us (but rarely outplayed us in even matches) we're finally fighting more balanced matches. It's a shame we had to drop to the lower tiers to manage this but it's down to the stupidity of Arenanet not sorting out free server transfers.

Anyway the people that have remained here (or returned after trying out other servers) are a good bunch with many skilled players from DAoC and WAR or even earlier games. We're seeing a lot more people coming onto WvW now which is great, and recent fights have been a good showcase of what WvW can be when it's played at a high level.

Bugger it, I'll post it here anyway because it's not as if I'm giving away any major secrets of upcoming strategies. It's in 3 exciting parts!

Ahem.

Firstly, it's my birthday everyone! Hurray! [Or it was, if you're reading this on the RPS forum after the 8th of January]

Secondly, started off my night with a spot of commanding in EB. That went fairly well, but I feel like leading in that place is the definition of herding cats.

So me and Sap switched to WSR BL. It was literally just the 2 of us at that point, but we were shortly joined by Alyss and a random fellow.

Once in the map, we met up with Rin Dreamweaver who was also leading a group of 4 and had just been capping camps all night.

We capped Astralholme and then pushed for Cliffside, as Rin thought that WSR were busy fighting with ROF, who had already capped their Bay.

Rin was right. 2 rams later and Cliffside was ours.

But why settle for silver when you can go for gold, right?

I took my team to bang on the north-eastern side door of WSR Garrison. Keep in mind that there was still about 4 of us in the party, but despite this we got the door to around 30% before being zerged.

In the meantime, Rin took his group to the watergate of Garrison with a golem. Secretly, I thought that their attack was doomed to failure because of such a cliché method, but it seemed like our distraction in the upper part of their Garrison had worked. Rin's team got in and, after we wiped, my lot joined them.

We took Garrison with about 12 people in total.

Glorious, right?

Dude, keep reading!

It was at this stage that people joined us in Mumble. I had not been in Mumble all night, which is an important point that folds into a huge rant that is pending but this is not the thread to post it in. Basically, as soon as we took Garrison, WSR hit us hard and fast. There was only about 30 of them but remember that we were 12 folks who had stumbled onto the jackpot of WvWvW and the place was pretty much undefended. We were grateful for the team on Mumble apparently arriving to help us, as they had seen that we had capped Garrison.

So I called out in /T multiple times for assistance at Garrison. Such a WSR zerg could be easily wiped if we had literally about 5 more people with us, considering that WSR are pretty much all up-levelled.

But the help didn't come. Instead, it seemed like the people who had just joined us tried to attack south Hills in search of their own glory instead of assisting us against a very easy threat. I admit, that did piss me off.

We lost Garrison to WSR, but the beautiful specimen of a Mesmer that is Access was able to portal us back in. A short time later, it was ours again.

Continued in the next post!

Guild Wars 2:

Main character name is Seigous Bearheart. I also play on Duke Witherheart. And Lindenheart.

To continue from my last post...
So despite re-capping Garrison from WSR on their own Borderlands, we had the issue of ROF who were expanding very quickly in our direction. Around the same time that we liberated Garrison again, the Johnny Cash worshippers had taken Longview.

Meanwhile, WSR had sent a very large force to Cliffside - a place which we had managed to maintain control of despite us taking Garrison twice within the space of 15 minutes.

Soon enough, we were outmatched on both fronts. I tried to get a treb up with the assistance of Jessopia and Malfious to attack Longview with, but before it even came close to being built, ROF were through the door of Garrison and we were overrun.

We lost Garrison and I set up a treb shortly after to attack Hills with in the usual place, directly west of the wall on the outcropping. However, the keep was full of supply and we were up against a reinforced wall with limited numbers on our side. They quickly countered our trebbing with mortar blasts and we thought that it was the end of our adventures in WSR BL. After all, we had just lost our greatest prize and were apparently losing ground in our own BL.

We regrouped at Astralholme, but at this point most people simply cleared off the map - including Rin and the folks that had joined us from Mumble.

I was left with 6 people - 4 of which I didn't even know and at least one of them seemed to be gunning for map completion. I shouted out in /T for the remaining folks on the map to regroup on me. No one else came.

Usually, you'd think that there was nothing more that we could do, right? Well it was around 22:30 my time by this point and I wasn't ready to give up just yet.

Stay tuned for the finale!

Guild Wars 2:

Main character name is Seigous Bearheart. I also play on Duke Witherheart. And Lindenheart.

And now the thrilling conclusion!
Our small fellowship headed north from Astralholme. Both ROF and WSR were swarming over the snowy landscape and we had to move quickly, otherwise they'd crush us like bugs.

We reached the northern supply camp and took it from the enemy in a flash. We rolled on and arrived at the sentry outside Longview.

2 minutes later and we were at the undefended gate of the tower, banging on it with a single ram and picking off defenders as they came towards it. At this stage, I was not playing for keeps. I called out in /T that we were at Longview and anyone on the map should rally on my commander tag, but I think maybe 2 more people at the maximum arrived. Somehow, our luck held out and we capped the tower without incident.

A randomer who was running with us suddenly started spouting about how we should take Dreaming Bay. Obviously, this guy wanted World Completion and who was I to deny it him?

We cascaded down to Arah's Hope (I think that's what the camp is called on the Red BL?) and loaded up on supply.

It was at this stage I turned to someone named Yaemar, who had only recently joined our guild. I'm all for giving newcomers chances and my 2 other guildies who were running with us had just gone to take down some dolyaks. So I said...

'Have you ever driven a golem before?'

'Once', Yaemar replied.

'This will be the second time then,' I shot back.

We quickly built a golem and set off towards Bay.

Slopsh went the AoE! Zuuuuum went the timewarps!

It took us about 10 minutes to cap Bay, using a single golem to get in and then a combined force of a golem and a ram on the inner gate. The ram was almost redundant, because the inner gate was on 40% by the time we actually got it built.

So we took Bay, but as I said earlier... why settle for silver when you can go for gold?

Our golem had taken a beating from going toe-to-toe with the lord in Bay and was on around 50% health. I decided to give it a royal send-off and marched it over to Garrison. We went straight up the road from Bay to the south-western gate.

At this stage, you might think that we'd have some defenders show up, right? Yet enemy players were mysteriously absent from proceedings. I was laughing all the way when the 7 of us (a few dropped out after we took Bay) swaggered into Garrison for the third time that evening, with none of us dying on the way and our golem remaining at half health.

The cap went so simply that it's hard to put into words. Sometimes we spend hours just fighting over a single tower, but we'd just got into Garrison yet again using simple tactics (we went around to the western inner gate when getting in). This was the third time we'd capped it within 2 hours. Fantastic.

It was at that stage I donated our battle-worn golem to the bloke who was after World Completion in the hopes that it would get him to stick with WvWvW and headed off to bed.

Here's the lesson:

Think simply, aim big and use what you've got effectively.

Guild Wars 2:

Main character name is Seigous Bearheart. I also play on Duke Witherheart. And Lindenheart.

I logged off as the people on mumble went over to our BL after the apparent "defeat", glad to see you got more fun out of WSR borders. Party & guild chat don't seem to work very often when i'm doing WvW for some reason

Actually the whole of last night seems to have been somewhat ignorant of map chat, one guy spent half an hour shouting for 1 more person with supply to take down a treb at anz until the zerg finally showed up. I & many others had been reproting incomings & other stuff also, to no avail (most of the time).

It was especially annoying when that Ohdavig guy comes out of nowhere and starts chatting about nonsense for at least 2 hours. So glad he's going back to RoF.

Awesome writeup Duke, sort of makes me sorry I went to bed. Sadly this shows that WSR is just a server and not a community, they do not communicate at all, considering any small number of players could've jumped BL and stopped you.

After losing garrison the first time in what was such a stupid defeat (the WSR force was very very weak - I fought almost alone against 4-5 of them while throwing 4 others off the cliff - big lulz here - for some good minutes, while the rest of our force was doing god knows what) I released and started running back after you. Around redlake I ran into a group of 5-6 WSR and, being alone, I backpedaled a little. But I happily found that there were a few other GH randoms nearby so thinking I'm not alone, I head towards the WSR group thinking the others would do the same. But they didn't. They ran away from a 1:1 fight into redlake (which was ours) and let me heroically die alone. That's when I blew my top. They even got out of the keep to res me after the WSR group left. How fucking nice of them.

PS About mumble, I've noticed a lot of people tend to ignore the chat completely when they're on voice-comms and that pisses me off. Some don't even answer to whispers... How hard is it to check your chat window from time to time?

I normally watch map chat but started to ignore it once that idiot Ohdavig started talking and everyone arguing with him. It's all a lot more difficult to pay close attention to map chat while you are constantly in combat. I also pay closer attention to party/squad chat than map chat.

I like mumble borderland voice chat when things are not hectic but I prefer the more focused smaller mumble alpha/baker/charly voice chat when we start attacking.

Last night i felt pretty lost in the masses though. (Only got in a party with you guys near the end). Went to the closest commander icon which happened to be trying something at south entrance of hills. Went away from that group once I noticed they were just messing around firing at the arrow carts and headed to the next commander icon.

The mumble/chat divide has been an issue right from the start. One of the more involved commanders said the other day that he never reads map chat, which is just daft when your server's success as a team relies on good communications. But then these are the same people that ignored EB for months as a dismal sink of PUGs and randoms and not worth learning the map, so maybe they'll come around to reading chat eventually.

I've found mumble to be of mixed effectiveness in large actions- as only one person can be speaking at any one time it's hard to chip in if someone's in the middle of a long rambling anecdote, even if it's something important like reporting incoming, and so it acts more like two-way radio where you're not sure when to come in.

It may just be me but when orders are given out I find I've completely forgotten them a few seconds later some of the time as I was busy fighting or whatever, and here having a written record of what's going on it much more useful. I try and make a point of typing up relevant info on where our squads are going and getting info out for everyone to see and I think it's always a good idea to send sighting reports to /m or /t as it's rarely the case of there being too much info. Having said that the chat spam on EB with the Ohdaving guy and the idiots that respond to him were doing my head in, even after I blocked the guy.

I'd suggest any squads executing a plan write a short note on /t to let others know as a matter of course, unless you're going super-sneaky or think there are spies in the zone. Not everyone on the map is an idiot and coordinating is our only hope of working well as a server.

Sigh- another post disappears into the bottomless pit of pre-moderation.

What I was trying to say was that mumble is of limited use with it being hard to break into someone's lengthy anecdote with useful reports, and it's always good to write up plans and sightings in short /t or /m comments for the benefit of everyone, and I frequently forget what plan was just communicated to me via mumble so a written history is invaluable. Oh and Ohdaving EB chat spam does my head in as well.

Oh and last night was great fun. I ended up with a small group of about 8 of us on RoF borders with Rin and only held the nearest tower. We went to take the adjacent supply and found a large crowd of RoF there, so we charged them and they went down fast and ran.

Bay was full of siege and manned cannon but we fought off their waves of superior numbers even though we should have been swamped straight off, and some quick ballista placement and use of CC (and the new ele jump trait woohoo!) caused all sorts of mayhem as they sent increasingly larger forces against us. It really showed how well GH players can fight and are not afraid of getting stuck into these timid pet-owning zergs.

I was called away to help defend our garrison which went down to the ICON golem rush (1 Omega and 3 Alphas)- which we eventually wiped when they came to recap it later, and we managed to take down their huge zerg several times with lesser numbers around Hills. All in all it's been a great week for good fights.

As for mumble; the people who act as if it can command without regard for team chat are ridiculous. Definitely one of our main issues as a server. I've heard people in mumble saying that they never look at team chat. How is this possible?!